Amish Restaurants in Lancaster County, PA

Smorgasbord vs. family-style vs. bake shop

A smorgasbordis a buffet line. You fill your own plate as many times as you want, pay one price at the door, and seat yourself. Shady Maple in East Earl is the biggest of these (well over 200 feet of buffet); Hershey Farm Restaurant, Dienners, and Plain & Fancy Farm are the better-known smaller-format options.

Family-styleseats strangers together at long tables and brings out bottomless platters of fried chicken, ham loaf, mashed potatoes with chicken gravy, brown buttered noodles, and four or five sides. You pay a fixed per-person price, leave when the platters stop coming back. Plain & Fancy Farm and Stoltzfus Farm Restaurant in Intercourse are the long-standing family-style operations.

Bake shopsare takeout-first. Shoofly and whoopie pies, sticky buns, fresh bread, soft pretzels, jarred chow chow, apple butter, and cup cheese. Bird-in-Hand Bake Shop, Achenbach's Pastries in Leola, and Stoltzfus Meat & Cheese run the biggest selections. A few of these have a small lunch counter; most do not.

What to order

The Pennsylvania Dutch table is built around seven sweets and seven sours. The old convention that every meal should balance sweet sides (apple butter, sweet pickles, shoofly pie) against sour ones (chow chow, pickled red beet eggs, pepper cabbage). Modern smorgasbords have loosened the rule but the categories still show up.

First-timers should look for ham loaf (a Lancaster County invention: ground ham and pork bound with milk-soaked crumbs, glazed with brown sugar), chicken pot pie (the local version is a soup with hand-rolled square noodles, not the crust-topped American casserole), and shoofly pie (molasses custard with a crumb top. Wet-bottom shoofly is gooier and more molasses-forward, dry-bottom is more cake-like).

Hours, cash, and what to expect

Most Amish-owned places close Sundays. A few non-Amish-owned Pennsylvania Dutch restaurants stay open, but the actual Plain Sect family operations observe the Sabbath without exception. Winter hours run shorter than summer. Several smorgasbords drop their Monday or Tuesday service from December through March.

Cash is friendlier than card at the smaller bake shops and farm stands. Most of the sit-down restaurants take cards now, but a 3-5% cash discount is common. ATMs sit at the entrances of the bigger smorgasbords for exactly this reason.

Photography etiquette:landscapes, buggies, and farm scenes are fine; close-ups of Plain-Sect people's faces are not. Asking before pointing a camera at a stallholder or server is the norm, and most will politely decline.